Short Reviews: Leong's Legends, Taiwanese, Chinatown, London

I don't think I've been to any other Taiwanese restaurant, but Leong's Legends (map) is certainly excellent. If you eat pork and don't mind (quite) a bit of fat I especially recommend the braised pork belly, it's delicious. Service is brisk, prices are very reasonable. Props to Kai RufieC for the find.

Recipes: Rich Chocolate Cake

This isn't the easiest cake recipe in the world (see picture), but as long as you make the icing nice and thick it will cover any imperfections in the cake itself. The hardest bit is folding in the egg whites at the end as by that point the mixture has usually solidified into a solid ball, for this reason I melt the butter, not that it helps much. It's also a good idea to let the cake cool (and thereby solidify) completely before slicing it in half, so remember to leave enough time for that.

The cake:

1. Beat 8oz butter with 8oz brown sugar.
2. Beat in 4 egg yolks one at a time adding a portion of 4 oz self raising flour after each one.
3. Fold in the rest of the flour, 4oz ground/chopped hazelnuts and 8oz melted chocolate.
4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.
5. cook the cake for 1 hr 15 mins at 170C, 325F, 4G. If it starts to get too brown cover with foil.

Once cooled slice into two and fill with 1/2 pint whipped cream.

The icing:

Melt and mix 6oz plain chocolate with 4oz sifted icing sugar and 4 tablespoons water.

Decorate with chopped hazelnuts.

Short Reviews: Cinnamon Kitchen, Liverpool Street, London

The Cinnamon Kitchen is excellent, in fact I think on my last visit it over took Konstam as my favourite restaurant in London.

All of the mains that I have tasted have been very good, the roast goose breast and rack of lamb especially stood out, although I can only describe the safron sauce that the lamb came with as "weird", I'm afraid I can't remember what the goose came with. And the pork chop I had the time before with vindaloo spices (just pleasantly warm) and marsala mash was perfect. The menu seems to change quite regularly, so don't sue me if these aren't available when you go.

While I wouldn't recommend one particular main the desserts are not so consistent, they're all interesting, but I would especially recommend the banana tart tatan, and if you don't like banana the chocolate fondant and mousse. The ice creams are good too.

Price wise the Cinnamon Kitchen is fairly varied, starting at a veggie main for about £12 to the red deer at about £30. My one caveat about this restaurant is that, in the tradition of Indian restaurants everywhere, they try to sell you more than you want or need, on our first visit we ended up with six starters between four people.

Short Reviews: Sandi Toksvig's Christmas Cracker, South Bank

Like watching your child's school play: slightly amusing, but only because you know some of the people in it. Five Guys Named Moe and the three opera singers were all very good and professional, something notable by its absence in the rest of the cast. The frequent jokes about needing to rehearse were more true than funny. To cap it all the sound was so bad in our section that we frequently missed parts of the jokes, those that there were. They might get better by the end of the run, but that's not much of a consolation to those of us that paid to see a dress rehearsal for your show.

Wonderful Spam Subjects

I love the way that spam filters are forcing spammers to be more and more creative with their subject lines, here are some of my recent favourites.

First we have the euphemism category:

Make your hose's radius great
Classic male 'uppers' Packed and dosed desire
Have a concrete thing in your pants
Settle the warrior in your fly.
ideal for bed-marathons.
Drive her wet and crazy
Getting woody in seconds!
Give your wang bulldozer power!
?"!BE NAUGHTY AND ENDURABLE!"?
Greater male volume and power enhancing.
Be her eromaniac
Enjoy night potency
She'll like your eagerness
Set desire to maximum
Exaltation of having your rod ready-for-action again!

Next we have the bonus "hoister" category, I've no idea why this word is so popular, maybe it's an Americanism:

Hoisters for your pork-lever
Male strength hoisters!
Your favorite ardor hoister!

Then we have the slightly bizarre category:

He was free to write on the snow
Your wife in bath on tape - Looking for sales?
Which she was holding up for it
Erase the memories of the defeat
-..YOUR BLOOD WILL BOIL AGAIN!..- - /!!TABLET OF HAPPINESS!!!/
Give her 3 hour rodeo
Unusual Places to Get It On!
What the doctor ordered - How please knocking-out hottie

On to the Ugh! category:

Energy to tear her ham wallet
Be her tight hole's attacker!
Rub her from inside

And finally the Uh? category:

{?} {?} {?}. {?} {?}
Who knows I collect Blaine dolls, Brian wondered, looking at the one seated on his router.

UPDATE: Looks like I'll have to continually update this post, just had these classics through:

Screw her rabbit hole - If your spaceship needs power
Getting tired after one act? You can easily get energy for ten more this night! - Have surprisingly good lovemaking
Lasting success in bedroom - We can't give you charm of Cazanova: But we can give you wood-on of Ron Jeremy!
Flame of your emotions - Superheat for amorous adventures

UPDATE2:

Your drawbolt will go deeper in - Stimulate necessary growth
What your score? - You'll peck her like crazy

The Lowest Common Denominator

I don't often catch BBC TV news, but when I do I am often struck by pointless on-scene reporting and presenters who almost reconstruct events for you, just in case you can't imagine it from their overly emotional language. I prefer the BBC website as it seems less sensationalist, more impartial and removed, but recently there seems to have been a slow slide to more emotive language and articles. For instance, a recent article on the royal harpist convicted of handling stolen goods described her as "hooked on heroin" and "in the grip of drugs", what's wrong with "addicted"? And today I read a story entitled Who was Arthur McElhill? I didn't know who Arthur McElhill was, so I read the story. Having read the article I have no idea as to why it was written and published on the BBC news site. It's a sensationalist horror story that is reminiscent of those cheap glossy mags that have exclamation marks in their titles and that has no useful conclusion.

From The Staff Newsletter

The many aims for developing a community of partners include:

• Unlocking values, strength and capacity
• Developing a channel for sharing customer challenges in a controlled environment and so delivering innovation and good ideas
• Working jointly with clients to meet their present and future challenges and needs

I hope that's cleared that up.

Hendry Kai Ian Car Sale Scam

If you are a (potential) victim of this scam please email: frauddesk@cityoflondon.police.uk.

Some general rules to live your life by:

• If it seems to good to be true then it probably is.
  
• If it quacks like a scam, swims like a scam and waddles like a scam then it's probably a scam.
  
• Even if the deal is reeeeeeeeeeeally good.
  
• Especially if the deal is really good.
  
• Especially if they are selling a new VW Bora in excellent condition for "4000EUR".
  

Things that should raise suspicions:

• A seller does not seem to know which way around their own names should go, for example, Hendry is a surname and Ian is a first name , not vice versa.
  
• You google the person, and find a big fucking warning in RED and YELLOW on their homepage warning idiots people like you not to fall for the scam.
  
• Complicated stories that involve selling goods internationally, eg, I am on business in KENTUCKY USA and I need the iPhone for my son who is in Lagos Nigera... etc, or, the car is in London but for some reason I am selling it on a German website to German users only. See also below.
  
• Random capitalised words, eg: "YOU will ask a friend to come with you to Western Union Office. HE will make a transfer so that HE will be the sender and YOU will be the receiver. YOU will receive the money from Western Union in UK,London"
  
• Native English speakers making simple errors, eg: "If you are not agree with this depozit i will not have eny problem, you can come to my when you want i dont have problem but i will not keep the car for you until you are here..Let me explain to you way i want this depozit:" (Ironically there is a distinct lack of capitalisation here, as well as uses of Z and missing As that wouldn't even be acceptable in America.)
  

Things not to trust on the internet:

• Images of passports. This does not prove anything apart from the fact that the seller has a picture of a passport. That image may have been doctored, the passport may not be real, or they may have just found a picture of someone else's passport that they rather inadvisedly put on flickr.
  
• Western Union. It seems that it is very easy to retrieve money from Western Union that is not meant for you.

UPDATE: If you want to scam the scammers a fake Western Union receipt might be in order.

UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hendry Kai Ian is now offering a BMZ Z4 Cabrio for €5500. Yes, it's still a scam, no matter how much you wish it wasn't.

UPDATE: And a Jeep Wrangler.

Sparkle

As it was Guy Fawkes last week the BBC's latest Your Photos gallery is on the subject of sparkle. As you can see, a number of the entries used sparklers to draw pictures on the camera's sensor. If I'd thought about it I would have sent them this picture that I took at Maddy's party.

I Take It All Back

I have previously sung the praises of O2's broadband support, well I take it back. I assume that when I joined O2 broadband they still had decent customer support as a hang over from Be Unlimited, well now it seems that O2 have managed to bring their broadband technical support in-line with their mobile technical support, ie, non-existent. I've been having major DNS problems for a few weeks and it seemed to be getting worse (dropping out for about a minute at a time, becoming more and more frequent). I had called a few times, waiting up to 10 minutes on hold and eventually emailed them. They promise to respond within 24 hours. Three working days later someone replied, asking me to call them in order to resolve the issue! The thing is that I know that my issue is not isolated, I don't know many people who use O2 broadband, yet at least one of them has the same issue as me. I have tried calling a few times since, but to no avail, I just get a "we are experiencing high call volumes at the moment" message. You would think that they could hire extra staff. I have since added a couple of public DNS servers to my list which has improved matters. To be fair, since I haven't actually managed to get through, I can't really comment on the quality of support you might get if you did get through, though I didn't reckon much to the email response.

UPDATE: After another three working days I got a second reply saying that the agent could not help me as my from address was not registered with the account. So I have been trying to use their broken form to add my email address to the account. I cannot believe how broken it is, it won't let me save the email address because my postal address is not formated correctly, and the type of phone field is mandatory, and each time the form reloads all the data I have entered disappears.